Wait a second...that is meaningless to you, and to explain it would just take too many words.
Maybe this is better...our lives were planned and it wasn't our choice?
Let me try again... Imagine sharing rides all the time with about 75 people in your neighborhood and doing so at specific times to specified, predetermined locations. This is not only something we were subjected to, living as a foreigner on the campus of a school 45 minutes from center city Istanbul, but a significant portion of the not so wealthy population in Istanbul also used service buses as a way of life.
It led to an extremely communal life, with some benefits, but ultimately a life that lacks any sort of spontaneity.
We never left campus unless it was by service bus (or the occasional taxi to get to the airport or the hospital to give birth), and other people only entered campus to work or attend the school that was there.
If you haven't followed the logistics up to this point, this means that our colleagues were our friends, and our colleague's kids were our kids' friends. It felt sort of incestuous at times, and we had to shape ourselves according to whoever came to live on campus any given year.
So, on the Saturdays when we didn't feel like trekking into the city for 8 hours with our 2 year old on a bus, with 20 other people who we worked with 40 hours a week and lived with the other 128, we were on campus - wandering around like nomads without a land to wander in and with nowhere to be. We had no definition.
I felt spontaneous today.
As a working American mother, I gave my kisses after walking in the door, threw on coats and shoes and whisked the boys to a magical place - the public park.
The park is the center of spontaneity. There is a chance to go to the one with the fireman's pole and the mini-zoo one day and the castle-like structure the next. There is a chance people we have never seen before might talk to us or play with us. There is a chance we will hear Spanish being spoken, and I can convince myself that I really would speak fluently if I was friends with a Spanish speaker. There is a chance friends who live somewhere else and work somewhere else might be there too. There is a chance (albeit slim) my husband might meet us there because he wants to spend time with the family, not because he wanted to escape the four walls of our home and the park was his only option.
When faced with many choices, choosing the park feels so virtuous.
we had the same little buses in damascus-- i found the spontaneity in that i never knew exactly where they were going or when or where they let people off the bus. also, the weird things i would do from breathing in so much carbon monoxide . . .
ReplyDeleteLove spontaneity, but don't you miss the buses just a little bit? ;)
ReplyDeleteBe spontainious
ReplyDeleteAnd get the bus.
Be spontainious
And not get bus.
Sounds awful where you were in Istanbul. Lots of luck. Thank you. Take care. Bye.
I do miss the buses...just a little bit. I guess I wouldn't have to worry about hitting anything and having to tell my husband when he gets back from a trip away.
ReplyDeleteDave - I am not sure we are talking about the same buses. There were also the buses you were talking about, but the buses I wrote of are the kind that only service a certain neighborhood, not the public/shared buses.
WPW - Istanbul is awesome - the living situation we were in was not so awesome.